somestranger26 said:

   
I disabled the flow control and interrupt moderation, and am using the built-in Intel I210 on my motherboard. Those didn't help. I've used these latency checkers before and never had any issues shown with them.
 
I used to have frequent and much longer USB dropouts when I had the original Audio-GD Digital Interface which was still using a crappy isochronous chip. That was when I was living in the dorms at college and the power quality was trash; when I moved off campus the mysterious dropouts disappeared. This makes me wonder if it's a similar issue in my current apartment, which has some of the worst power PS Audio's engineers have ever seen (it was constructed in 2014!!!). I've never had any dropouts with async USB, but who knows.
 
I'm going to wait and see if the problem resolves itself when I move to a brand new condo in August, which should have much better power and I also had them run a dedicated circuit for audio.
 
If that doesn't work, I'm going to reinstall W10 because I have no idea what drivers or software could  be causing it. The Thesycon download page recommended watching the DPC checker while disabling devices, but that isn't helpful when it's green 99.999% of the time and then 10ms every 15 minutes it has a huge latency spike. Very hard to diagnose. Increasing ASIO latency, buffer, etc. doesn't make a difference.
 
I'm also going to be replacing my RAID SSDs with a single M2 NVMe SSD so I can then disable the RAID controller, SATA controller, and get four drives worth of noise out of the system.
 
Here is my computer giving me the middle finger every 20 minutes:

 
 
So no difference with LPS on receiver, and a small difference with LPS on both ends? Mine are on the way back. The $200 I gain returning the optical boxes and selling my LPS is better put toward an MC-3+ USB. Maybe I'll revisit these sort of tweaks once I upgrade my speakers and buy a better DAC for the speaker system. Currently looking at either a Dangerous Convert-2, Yggdrasil, or used PS Audio DirectStream. Speakers will be upgraded from Magnepan MMG to 3.7i.

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soundsgoodtome said:

My pc passed the two latency tests, but still got skip.

I did a bunch of stuff under the network card configuration and got it working proper with 24/192khz - something I've not been able to do before. Problem is now I've enabled everything I disabled but can't make 24/192khz not work anymore.

More importantly, @somestranger26, the high latency in my rednet control is now down to the green zone of 1-1.2 ms average whereas before it was 11-14 averaging in the red when sending 192khz.

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clemmaster said:

  My Rednet 3 stills screws up my router's wifi, no matter what I do.
 
Basically, when audio is streaming, the Wifi connection becomes extremely slow after one or two minutes (the devices are still connect, but the bars go down to 1 and report "no network connection").
I'm wondering if the Rednet is using multi-cast and saturates the router?
 
I upgraded to am Asus RT-AC56U with dual cores and 256MB ram, to no avail.
 
In the end, I resorted to a direct connection from my laptop to the Rednet (no switch, straight cable. Thanks APIPA).
 
Still, it's an annoying issue. I contacted Focusrite's support.

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rb2013 said:

Progress!

Dante is not compatible with Wifi I believe - nor Ravenna.

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jabbr said:

Dante devices cannot run over Wifi, but I believe the poster meant that his Wifi is slowing when his Dante is connected by CAT to the LAN. This is a situation that Audinate warns about and requires proper configuration of network switches.

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jabbr said:

Dante devices cannot run over Wifi, but I believe the poster meant that his Wifi is slowing when his Dante is connected by CAT to the LAN. This is a situation that Audinate warns about and requires proper configuration of network switches.

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jabbr said:

@Clemmaster: good work to find the multicast setting, which you surmised might be the cause.


@all:
Seeing the modular build of the Aqua La Scala DAC (and also Voce and Formula DACs), I dropped them a mail if they ever considered offering a Dante input using the Brooklyn II board. I think it should be relatively easy for them to incorporate. If they do, it will be the first audiophile DAC with direct Dante support, I believe.

Will relay their response.

Cheers

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rb2013 said:

And a mighty fine DAC to boot!  The La Scala Mk2 on my watch list for the used market.

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jabbr said:

Did you already read about their new Formula DAC? http://www.digitalaudioreview.net/2016/06/next-level-aqua-hifi-formula-la-scala-mkii-w-telefunken/

This might cause a few Scala MKII to come onto the market. We'll both be fighting over the same bone

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  Sossa had done just that. He’d rolled the stock tubes – either JJ or Genalex according to Aqua’s sales manager Stefano Jelo – for a pair of NOS Telefunken.
And boy was Sossa excited about what he’d heard. So much so that he wanted yours truly to hear it for himself. And by Christmas I had the Telefunkens ready to roll.
The schedule intrusion of CES 2016 meant I’d have to wait until February to plug the NOS tubes into their Aqua sockets for the first time and then again wait out CanJam SoCal until I could be be confident that burn-in doubts had fully dissolved. That was late March. Listening proper then took place, on and off, A and B, throughout April.
These NOS (new old stock) tubes applied to this NOS (non-oversampling, filterless) decoder brought small but noticeable upticks in tonal colour saturation, soundstage depth and, most palpable of all, an even greater sense of ease – a defining characteristic (for this commentator) of digital done well.
The best was now even better.

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That’s a proof-of-life diversion on Jelo’s other project. Back to Aqua. Back to the new flagship DAC. Back to basics – where tubes have gone bye-bye and where in-house built resistor ladders supplant the Burr Brown chips of the La Scala. Formula remains filterless with two R2R boards used per channel, one for each half of the waveform – four in total.

The Formula’s resistor ladder ‘branches’ deliver twice the sample-rate support of the outgoing (and long discontinued) PCM1704 chips whose dwindling supply points to one reason why these Milanese have gone with a bespoke multibit solution. The front panel sports eight LEDs indicating incoming PCM sample rates from 44.1kHz to 382kHz. They also make explicit Aqua’s ongoing red carding of DSD.
 

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rb2013 said:

$13k+ and no tubes!  Not my cup of tea.

The only issue on the La Scala MK2 and AOIP with the RN3 - it does only up to 178k and the RN3 192k, but no 178k.  So a SR mismatch there.  Could run at 96k but that's not optimal for the LSMK2 filters.  But ideal for the DAC60.

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- etherCON RJ45 AQlink (I2S serial bus) - 24 bit / 384 KHz
- AES/EBU balanced 110 ohm - 24 bit / 192 KHz
- BNC coax (S/PDIF) 75 ohm - 24 bit / 192 KHz
- RCA coax (S/PDIF) 75 ohm - 24 bit / 192 KH
- USB port - 24 bit / 192 KHz
- AT&T (ST Fiber) - 24 bit / 192 KHz (optional)

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jabbr said:

No worries, it does 192 kHz
http://www.aquahifi.com/file/LaScala_datasheet_rev2_eng.pdf

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If such an opinion seems quasi heretical—anti posh Mullard that is—I have another one to add to the mix. Performing PureMusic A/Bs between native 44.1kHz streaming and 4 x upsampling to 176.4kHz with 64-bit DSP in 'NOS mode', the latter sounded rounder and smoother without undermining exactitude. As Norbert Lindemann of German Lindemann Audio agrees, performing upsampling with free computer power rather than lower on-chip math is always superior. Whilst the La Scala II is a 'zero-sampling' deck, applying some upshifting to the signal before it ever hits the BB1704K chips can make for a small free bonus. And it's quickly defeated should you disagree or not hear any difference. 

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With that settled, I'd continue my comparisons with Aqua's stock glass, bolt the lid back on and use PureMusic's power-of-two math to this converter's max as set by its 192kHz ceiling. 

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"My friend has a pair of his Brimar 12AX7 running for already 14'000 hours still testing strong. His tubes have been in my amp and preamp for a few thousand hours and perform beautifully. He travels the globe in search of all varieties of tubes.  Bar none he is the most knowledgeably guy on tubes I've ever met. He has thousands in stock. Yes, thousands!" To be sure I'd leave no performance under the table, I had to acquire at least one pair of über NOS bulbs to match the top NOS silicon of this deck. If I got just one best-case pair, what would Alfred recommend? Since I wasn't shy on overall system gain, were there sonic advantages to be had by going after 12AU7 instead? Albert had just one answer. "Hands down, the tube to go with is our NOS British-made Mullard 6201 gold pin. It is an absolute reference 12AT7 tube with a dead-black background and superbly musical.

"We have clients using this exact tube in their Neumann microphones for both commercials and singing applications where an absolute black background is critical. In addition and with equal success clients are using them in reference amplifiers and preamps.The only other tube in the world that can rival the Mullard 6201 is the Telefunken ECC801S.  Given that the Mullard is less than half the price, it is a total bargain. I also find the Telefunken to be a little more on the cold side. The Mullard will give that DAC a lifelike presence and depth that those crappy Soviet or Chinese tubes could never even imagine." I promptly ordered two pairs for €300 total + $20 for shipping. One of them could go into my Nagra Jazz afterwards, with the other for backup.

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rb2013 said:

I see I had misread the 6Moons review.  Excellent!

http://www.6moons.com/audioreviews2/aqua/1.html


But now noticed the final part:
That's on the SPDIF coax input which is how he tested it.

Must sound sweet with these Mullards or Tele 801s

Now feed this baby the RN/Mutec combo!  That would be something to hear.

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As it turned out, sonic alienation was the verdict. With the Mullards at work, the sonic bandwidth narrowed to more midrange centric. The two octaves below middle C lost pluck and spunk. Gnarly bass lines working this range missed some impact and incisiveness. The two top octaves as the usual home of cymbal and triangle finesse fogged over and foreshortened decays. On a heavily reverberant recording like Sœur Marie Keyrouz's Psalms for the 3rd Millennium which sports church-recorded orchestra, chorus and solo vocals in a farfield perspective, the Mullards' thickness seemingly increased the venue's RT60 figure. This undermined separation and individuated distinctiveness for a bit of a Mists of Avalon effect. Vigorous Flamenco guitar arpeggios and chordal tremolos lost flash and brio to move away from on-string details. Like certain cat litter, I had clumps, not fine granules.


Sonic alienation in this context means a strong personal suspicion. Aqua Hifi's very specific circuit tuning with their chosen and matched stock tubes got compromised when the Mullards mulled over the situation. Being very familiar with Aqua's La Voce II in my headfi nightstand system, I'm 100% sure that if the Mullards came stock, the circuit would have been revoiced to compensate. Without said compensation, the Mullards really did alienate what I thought was the design's original intention.

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